Reporter Who Challenged Afghan War Policy Dies in Car Crash

Reporter Michael Hastings, whose career-making profile of U.S. General Stanley McChrystal spurred the top Afghanistan war commander to resign, has died in a car accident in Los Angeles. He was 33 years old. A journalist and war correspondent, Hastings’s 2010 Rolling Stone feature about McChrystal, titled “The Runway General,” was a fearless account of the handling (and mishandling) of the war and drew widespread attention and acclaim, landing the writer a publishing deal that resulted in his 2011 book “The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan.” Hastings, who also authored “I Lost My Love in Baghdad: A Modern War Story,” a 2008 book that in part dealt with the death of his girlfriend in Iraq, worked as a contributing editor to Rolling Stone and wrote about politics for the website BuzzFeed. In a statement on Buzzfeed, editor-in-chief Ben Smith wrote: “We are shocked and devastated by the news that Michael Hastings is gone. Michael was a great, fearless journalist with an incredible instinct for the story, and a gift for finding ways to make his readers care about anything he covered from wars to politicians.” He continued, “He wrote stories that would otherwise have gone unwritten, and without him there are great stories that will go untold. Michael was also a wonderful, generous colleague, a joy to work with and a lover of corgis — especially his Bobby Sneakers. Our thoughts are with Elise and and the rest of his family and we are going to miss him.”

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